There’s something wonderful about the last few moments before a raucous house party, when there are only a few people there and the hostess is still rushing around, putting things away and pushing aside the tables and chairs to make room for the crowds and the dancing.
One of the privileges of attending the big summer rock shows at the Bowl is getting a look at some of the hardest-working people in the music business-opening acts. Typically they are young, ambitious, and riding some considerable early success. The opening slot gigs are a chance to practice for the big day-coming soon-when everybody in the audience is there to see them. And, in the best cases, the urgency of the situation comes across in the performance, and you get the feeling that, for now at least, everything counts.
In her second solo exhibition at Sullivan Goss, Angela Perko demonstrates that she has grown quietly into a position of preeminence among contemporary Santa Barbara painters who employ abstraction in their treatment of landscape. In dialogue with nature, her work glows with inner warmth, and the mirror of reflection yields to the lamp of imagination.
Knighthoods don’t get bestowed every day in 21st-century California, so when they do, it’s time to celebrate. Fred Sidon has been a resident of Santa Barbara since he retired from strategic consulting in 1992, and in those 15 years, he has put his considerable talents and enormous energy behind a variety of cultural projects, including Opera Santa Barbara.
Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol begins with footage of Andy Warhol’s sadly under-attended Catholic funeral back in Pittsburgh and not the super-glamorous New York memorial service held on April 1, 1987.
As Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” echoed through the Santa Barbara Bowl on Tuesday, dancers began to appear among the crowd. These were the Harajuku girls, Gwen Stefani’s roving entourage of breakdancing Japanese-style fetishists, and they signaled the imminent arrival of her holiness, the reigning queen of Orange County mall chic, the original hollaback girl.
Gove County is a real string quartet, even if the leader, Jim Connolly, plays the bass, and the music is sometimes quite far from the traditional classical repertoire. Sunday’s performance included Kirsten Monke on viola, Sally Barr and Laura Hackstein on violins, and Anna Abbey on piano and vocals.
The radiant smiles that broke out in the violin section during the third movement of John Adams’s piano concerto Century Rolls said it all. David Robertson and Orli Shaham delivered everything a young musician could hope for in a conductor and a soloist, respectively, as they led a rousing first orchestra concert of the academy season at the Lobero.
Studio Three East’s director, Erika Carter, makes the most of her extensive social network with this exhibit, which allows Philip Koplin and Virginia McCracken, who happen to live together, to show as a team.
Conductors can generate a lot of excitement around a concert, especially when they are as highly regarded (and as heavily hyped) as David Robertson, who will be at the Lobero Theatre on Saturday, June 30 to conduct the first of the Music Academy’s Festival Orchestra concerts.
